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Topic: Just a few questions about potential modding. (Read 2701 times)

If I wanted to include my own music, would it be as simple as placing a .ogg in the RuntimeData >> Music folder? Similarly, is it that easy to add custom sprites, ground textures and back drops? I apologize if this has already been asked, perhaps I just missed it. At any rate, if anyone knows, an answer would be appreciated. Thanks.

If I wanted to include my own music, would it be as simple as placing a .ogg in the RuntimeData >> Music folder?

That is the case for AI War, where it just plays a custom loop of all the tracks in the music folder; but that does not work for AVWW. If you want to add music, you'll actually have to replace one of the existing tracks. At that point your replacement track will then play during whatever contexts the original track would normally play in.

Similarly, is it that easy to add custom sprites, ground textures and back drops?

For all of the above, you can replace existing assets with textures of the same size, but you can't add new ones. And actually, for repeating textures for things like backgrounds, you don't even have to have the replacement asset be the same size as the original. For things that are sprite dictionaries like the particle effects or character art, though, you want to make sure that the frames are in the same locations within the image and are of individually the same size.

Tip: In the game development subforum of the arcen forums we actually have a freeware tool that we created called PNG Renamer which makes creating compatible dictionaries a breeze; there's instructions in the thread that holds the tool.

And by the by: if you come up with some textures that are your own original work that mesh with the general style of the game, those are something we could potentially include in the official builds if you like. We've done that sort of thing before with ships and effects in AI War, where players came up with their own designs as a replacement for one ship, and then we added (with their permission) those in as instead completely new ships that had new functionality attached.

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And by the by: if you come up with some textures that are your own original work that mesh with the general style of the game, those are something we could potentially include in the official builds if you like. We've done that sort of thing before with ships and effects in AI War, where players came up with their own designs as a replacement for one ship, and then we added (with their permission) those in as instead completely new ships that had new functionality attached.

I'll have to keep that in mind - I'm no artistic expert, but it couldn't hurt to take a crack at it, at any rate. It's good to see a company whose developers pay attention to, let alone incorporate the communities ideas. Props to you and to Arcen - AVWW is an amazing game.

Thanks for that! It means a lot to us all that AVWW is finding a happy home with so many gamers.

Here's to hopefully another three years of making it even more giant!

I hear that. At any rate, if I can come up with anything that makes sense with the atmosphere of the game I'll submit it to you guys- it'd be cool to see something of my own in this game, so. I'll see what I come up with tonight, anyway...

If you could do something to support more Custom Music, I would be incredibly happy. I love the music in the game, but I want to actually toss in additional music.

For example, when I'm in the ocean, not only would it be able to select from the two ocean tracks that the game already has...but a couple more that I'd add in. So the music doesn't get repetitive while I'm combing the caves.

I'm getting a potential Well of Souls vibe from all this modding stuff. Does anyone remember that game? They let you script your own quests, add in new textures and music, too. It's kind of interesting how similar the games are (in aspects other than the actual gameplay.)

If you could do something to support more Custom Music, I would be incredibly happy. I love the music in the game, but I want to actually toss in additional music.

For example, when I'm in the ocean, not only would it be able to select from the two ocean tracks that the game already has...but a couple more that I'd add in. So the music doesn't get repetitive while I'm combing the caves.

Any way you could do this in the future?

Actually, I had forgotten that this is already possible. Here's how to do it:

1. Look in RuntimeData\Music\Ingame and find the track that you want to add "variants" of. Say, Ocean1.ogg

2. Open the RuntimeData\Music\Ingame\Variations folder and now start adding numerals after that, starting with 2. So it would be Ocean12.ogg, then Ocean13.ogg, etc, for each track you wanted to add for that.

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